How to get a Refrigerator to Bibemi:

Long time no write. Okay so what’s new in the life of Aubrey in Cameroon. Let’s see. Well, first off, everyone note the new address. That is the address you should use for letters and packages. It is much closer to where I actually live (as in not a 3 day trip but rather a 2 hour trip) so I will get these letters and packages much sooner. Now, packages are expensive to send but letters aren’t so no excuses for not writing letters! Okay, moving quickly along, I have been working weekdays at the health center. It is a pretty sweet job. I give polio vaccines, vitamin A supplementations, figured out that the blood pressure device I am using is for people who are left handed and that makes my life much easier now – ha! Monday’s are prenatal consultations, Tuesday’s are childhood vaccines, Wendesday I go en brosse (out to really rural areas). So one random Tuesday, one of the women at the health center was trying to pinpoint her child’s birthday (or at least ballpark it) and her response was that her child was born right after the “big group of nasaras arrived in Pitoa” – hey glad to do my part in keeping time here in Bibemi! That made me laugh.

Mike and I bought new refrigerators for our houses. This wouldn’t be a big deal in the US (or Europe) as you would simply have this large item delivered to your house. No such deal here in Cameroon. So, (and keep in mind when I say I bought a refrigerator that it didn’t buy a full sized one but a mini one that is larger than a dorm fridge but not by much) Mike and I purchased these refrigerators, they were put into their large boxes and that was that. We were stuck with them in the middle of the grand marche in Garoua. Well, we convinced the store owner who we bought these fridges from that he should include in the price of the fridge a car ride to the Peace Corps office in Garoua (about a 5 minute car ride). He agreed to this and included that ride (which was rumored to be about 2000 CFA – or $4) in the price of the fridge. Little victories people, little victories. So, now Mike and I had these monstrosities at the PC office but that certain wasn’t our houses and we still had to figure out how to get them back to Bibemi. There aren’t cars to Bibemi, there are mottos, and as much fun as riding a motto with a refrigerator would be (they would have been willing to do it – anything in this country can go on a motto – and I mean anything) we opted against it as a concept. So, Mike had been brilliant enough to get the phone number of the guy who drove us out to Bibemi the first time (when we moved there) and so we gave him a call and Mike successfully set up this car to bring us to Bibemi the next day at lunch. Sadly, we were going to have to pay a lot to do this – but, that is life and honestly I didn’t see any other way to realistically get these fridges home. So, once we knew we were getting a car, we bought all the large things we knew we needed. Mike bought 2 giant garbage cans to store water in. You don’t have trash cans here because well, you just throw trash on the ground – sad, but true. I road a motto from downtown Garoua to the PC office (on the outskirts of Garoua) and that was quite a site – people laughed at the nasara with the crazy stuff on her motto. The next morning when I was buying sheets for this couch I have a man who works in the store was wearing a Southeastern Louisiana University t-shirt. This might not mean anything to most of you reading it but if you are my mother or grandmother it will – they both went to this university at some point. It is a small university in the small town in Southeast Louisiana where I grew up and lived for 14 years. I didn’t take a picture because he was at work and I thought that would be rude but my grandmother has strongly requested one so I am not on a mission to go back and find him again with the shirt on. I have two years to do it I suppose! Anyway, we made quite a seen entering Bibemi again with a car loaded down with all this giant stuff.

The next day we went a raided the furniture warehouse of things left by the NGO who’s house I live in. I got a few new things and moved around some furniture in my house and Mike took a few things too. Then, I began to settle in with my new things and my new set up. I am still not done nesting but then again, are you ever really done doing that. I feel like anyplace I lived I am constantly changing things I don’t like and moving things around and whatnot – perhaps I am just really restless.

Soon after we arrived home with all this new stuff I started to feel sick. Sadly, I got nothing cool. No malaria. No schisto. Just a plain old fashion sinus infection. But, of course that is also fairly complicated here. I went to the hospital in Bibemi, the doctor wasn’t there, some guy who works there with the Minister of Public Health offered to see me and write me a prescription (at this point it was obvious what I had) and so he did. I am allergic to penicillin though and this of course got complicated. They have no antibiotic other than penicillin in Bibemi right now. Great, awesome. That meant I had to go back to Garoua on another 2 hour motto ride (2 hours each way, not total) and find erythromycin. But, I did this. On the way I stopped at the big market in Adoumri and bought some food and all that. Carrots are currently in season (down south, they don’t grow up here) and they suddenly have popped onto the radar here. Honestly one day they just showed up. It is the strangest thing. I also saw a one legged man riding a bicycle and props to him because that looked difficult. I shared the road to Garoua with many a cotton trucks because right now it is cotton picking time. I love that I know when cotton picking time is. I am not aware of that in America. Garoua was a success though and I was back here the same day.

Once I got back and had the medicine I needed I started on fulfilling the promise I had made to Non Kong about making him the cookies. So, Sunday I made cookies for him. I made 1.5 batches of cookies. You might wonder about the .5 of a batch. That would be because I ran out of gas for my oven/stove. Want to know where the only place you can get gas is – GAROUA! Literally 36 hours after returning to Garoua I already have a reason I must return shortly. Well, at this point I cannot go Sunday because it’s too late and I have work Mon, Tues, and Weds so I will go Thursday. Mike and I ate at his house all this week – it worked out just fine but was sad because I couldn’t have tea in the morning. Also, since this week is a full moon, when I walk home at night the sky is so bright because of the moon that I don’t need to use my flashlight until I am in my eucalyptus forest! Again, I have never in my life been so aware of the cycles of the moon as I am here but honestly – it makes a huge difference in how bright the sky is at night! Oh, did I mention that one night Mike and I were at my house cooking dinner (the day before the gas ran out) and suddenly my cat starts dragging something large across the porch. She has left me rat tails and mice heads before as gifts so I know she is a hunter but this didn't look like an animal. Well, it wasn't an animal, it was a giant bat! She had taken down a bat and was dragging it over to her dishes to kill. Mike and I ran outside to see what it was and noticed it was a bat. I swept it off my porch onto my dirt front yard. A few minutes later the cat had the bat back on the porch, dead and headless and on my door mat as a gift to me. Mike then picked up the now dead bat and threw it over the fense. Two mornings later the partly petrified bat was on my mat again! Guess the cat really likes me!

One thing about the medicine I forgot to mention, the doctor didn’t give me any guidelines about how much to take, how often to take it, and how much to buy. So, I looked up the adult dose for erythromycin in the book “Where There is no Doctor” because at that moment in time that applied to me. The PC doctor is on call during the weekend but this wasn’t an emergency so I didn’t bother them. The book said the adult dose was 500 mg 4x a day. So, that is what I meant to take but honestly 4 times a day with food is hard to pull of when you eat 3 meals a day and spacing the pills out means that you need to wake up in the middle of the night to take the 4th pill and that just doesn’t happen often. So, between Saturday and Monday I took 4 pills only once and 3 each other day. Turns out, 3 was the dose I needed. I called the PC doctor on Monday and talked with him and he said I needed to take 3 pills each day for 10 days. Awesome. I had only bought 2 sheets of pills and that would only last me about 6.5 days. Yet another reason I couldn’t put off going to Garoua. So, tomorrow morning I will be meeting Phil at 8am at the Adoumri market and we will be heading to Garoua. Thursday is the cheapest and easiest day to get to Garoua because thanks to Adoumri’s large cattle market (and by large I mean largest in Central Africa) there are cars to Garoua. At least I won’t have to take my giant gas tank that is about half the size of me on the motto with me both ways! Wish me luck with this adventure!

Alright, in the provincial capital now at a computer. Let me just say that getting here with the giant gas tank was far from fun or easy, but I did it. I arrive here only to hear that THEY ARE OUT OF GAS IN GAROUA! What the hell? Honestly, I almost threw something. But, instead I just brough my gas tank to the PC office and I am going to go see if I can get the story about the gas situation while I am not carrying around a 35 pound gas tank (that I already carried for 20 minutes this morning while walking to the vans). Once again, wish me luck.

Oh, side note. Some of you have been asking me what exactly a motto is. I will try to get a picture up – if possible a picture of me, the driver, and my giant gas tank sharing a motto – but it is basically a small motorcycle. Bigger than a scooter but smaller than a Harley. I seats two people fairly comfortably and 3 if you are willing to swish. I have seen about 6 Cameroonians share one (I honestly don’t know how) and also a driver with a table flipped upside down with a cow inside it and a man sitting on the cow. Mottos are the only form of transport once you get outside the big cities and aren’t traveling from one large city to another (in which case there are “buses”) and therefore Cameroonians have learned to fit any and everything on these little guys. Also, the roads here aren’t paved outside the major cities (and all the roads in a major city aren’t paved, only the really big ones) so riding a motto off route on these bumpy dirt paths when they are loaded down with things is the reason I wear a motto helmet each time I ride (that and it is one of the 5 rules that if you break they kick you out of PC no questions asked). Alright, hope that explains the motto thing a bit more!

One more side note, can I just say that the world of PC is extremely small. Well, I suppose the world itself is small and PC is just an especially small group within it. So, I was looking at my friend Sarah's (who is a fellow PCV and Tulane MI) blog. She is serving in Mozambique. As I looked at her pictures one of the girls in the photos stood out to me and I realized I knew this girl. That's right, a girl named Gracey who lived in the same small town in Louisiana that I did so many years ago is now a PCV in Mozambique with Sarah. It is seriously a small world.